A Record of Buddhistic kingdoms: being an account by the Chinese monk Fa-hsien of travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399-414) in search of the Buddhist books of discipline eBook

(13) Meaning, as explained in Chinese,
“a tree without knots;” the ficus
Indica. See Rhys Davids’ note, Manual,
p. 39, where he says that a branch of one of these
trees was taken from Buddha Gaya to Anuradhapura
in Ceylon in the middle of the third century B.C, and
is still growing there, the oldest historical tree
in the world.

(14) See chap. xiii, note 11.
I have not met with the account of this
presentation. See the long
account of Prajapati in M. B., pp. 306-315.

(15) See chap. xx, note 10. The
Srotapannas are the first class of saints, who
are not to be reborn in a lower sphere, but attain
to nirvana after having been reborn seven times
consecutively as men or devas. The Chinese
editions state there were “1000” of the
Sakya seed. The general account is that they
were 500, all maidens, who refused to take their
place in king Vaidurya’s harem, and were in consequence
taken to a pond, and had their hands and feet cut
off. There Buddha came to them, had their
wounds dressed, and preached to them the Law.
They died in the faith, and were reborn in the region
of the four Great Kings. Thence they came
back and visited Buddha at Jetavana in the night,
and there they obtained the reward of Srotapanna.
“The Life of the Buddha,” p. 121.

(16) See the account of this event in
M. B., p. 150. The account of it reminds me
of the ploughing by the sovereign, which has been an
institution in China from the earliest times.
But there we have no magic and no extravagance.

(17) “The place of Liberation;”
see chap. xiii, note 7.

(18) See the accounts of this event
in M. B., pp. 145, 146; “The Life
of the Buddha,” pp. 15, 16;
and “Buddhist Birth Stories,” p. 66.

(19) There is difficulty in construing
the text of this last statement. Mr. Beal
had, no doubt inadvertently, omitted it in his first
translation. In his revised version he gives for
it, I cannot say happily, “As well as at
the pool, the water of which came down from above
for washing (the child).”

(20) See chap. xvii, note 8. See
also Davids’ Manual, p. 45. The latter
says, that “to turn the wheel of the Law”
means “to set rolling the royal chariot wheel
of a universal empire of truth and righteousness;”
but he admits that this is more grandiloquent than
the phraseology was in the ears of Buddhists.
I prefer the words quoted from Eitel in the note
referred to. “They turned” is probably
equivalent to “They began to turn.”

(21) Fa-hien does not say that he himself
saw any of these white elephants, nor does he speak
of the lions as of any particular colour. We
shall find by-and-by, in a note further on, that, to
make them appear more terrible, they are spoken
of as “black.”

A Record of Buddhistic kingdoms: being an account by the Chinese monk Fa-hsien of travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399-414) in search of the Buddhist books of discipline from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.